Meet the bloggers

Everybody, meet Amy! She is 29 years old and is a Yorkshire girl. Amy has had Crohn’s Disease symptoms as long as she can remember but was diagnosed at age 7.

At the time, she was the third youngest in the country with Crohn’s Disease so IBD knowledge and how to treat it etc has come on a lot since then. Amy was diagnosed with Crohn’s of mainly the small bowel and was treated accordingly but unfortunately quite unsuccessfully until tests when she moved up to the adult clinic at aged 17 led to a re-diagnosis of Crohn’s of the colon, rectum & anus mainly.

After nearly 12 years of medications and treatments, Amy’s Crohn’s became so severe and unresponsive to treatment that she had to have surgery to give her her permanent ileostomy, Stacey Stoma, in 2011. Surgery was long and complex as a benign tumour the size of a watermelon was found attached to her colon and this left her within hours of her life. Surgeons said if the operation had been hours later, the chances of her being alive to tell the tale were very slim.

Surgery left Amy with what she likes to call a “warrior scar”, measuring about 6 inches down her stomach to the side of her belly button. She loves to share her body confidence journey with stoma surgery to hopefully help others to do the same and loves to help others out with IBD, stomas and their mental health especially. Amy is super partial to a vanilla latte or a pink gin and lemonade and loves greyhounds. She is engaged and works full time in accounts, as well as being a part-time health blogger & running her Instagram account to help & educate others who decide to join her on her journey. She also loves clothes, her “ostomy fashion” posts & can often be found singing in her spare time (and when working too!)

Amy’s favourite saying is “you own your stoma bag, it doesn’t own you.”

Meet Natalie-Amber, a model and local BBC Radio Presenter from Swindon.

Natalie trained at Wilkes Academy School of Performing Arts before she collapsed and went temporarily blind in December 2017. Natalie-Amber was rushed to hospital where her parents were told to prepare for the worst, she had sepsis and kidney failure. Natalie had two emergency surgeries which resulted in her having 35cm of her small intestine cut out, left with a stoma bag and a diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease.

This was a great shock, because for seven years of unexplained stomach pain and sickness, Natalie-Amber had been mis-diagnosed and told by doctors she was anorexic, falsely assumed because of her profession.

Natalie-Amber had a stoma for a year when it was reversed she was left with a big scar down her stomach, a stoma scar and a drain scar, she has since dedicated her life to raising awareness for Irritable Bowel Disease (IBD) and scar positivity. This includes empowering women where she hosts body confidence shoots twice a year and a fashion show every other year to raise money for Crohn’s and Colitis UK for which she awarded the Alex Domain Awareness Award in 2018 and a finalist for the

MTM Black & Asian Awards – Young Achiever award in 2019 and is now up for the Rosa Hui Empowering Women award 2020 which has been postponed to later this year 2021 due to the pandemic.

Natalie-Amber continues to model, including being the face of the National Lottery ‘Set for Life’ campaign and for Adidas while she had a stoma bag. Her latest work has been part of a BBC documentary talking about Crohn’s Disease and her body confidence shoots shot in lockdown with Amy Dowden from Strictly Come Dancing who also has Crohn’s.  To relax she likes to watch films and cuddle up with her three hairless Sphynx cats.